My history with history is skimpy. Presumably I took whatever courses were required back in high school. My major in college left such areas untouched, and although my mother's favorite books were biographies that dove into greatness I left them on the shelf. 

 

The Fourth of July speech in my small town was given by the local civics teacher, who regretfully never taught my twins. They wanted him to. So when he began his allotted five minutes holding a microphone with the disclaimer that he wished he could speak for two hours, I wished it too. 

 

He referenced a speech by Frederick Douglass, whom I googled, and hence am well informed. 

 

"I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the 'quick round of blood,' I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: 'I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.' Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil."

 

The illustrations Douglass offered of the inhumanity of man to man/woman pierced me deeply. The lions are still prowling today. It gives me hope that there are Douglasses even now who will emerge from their oppression. 

 

"Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, 'may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!' To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world."

 

Perhaps what moves me like the aftershocks of an earthquake, is the realization that Douglass's words still affect us long after he has moved to an even more indescribable landscape of rainbows. The fleeting span of one day of earthly drudgery is forgotten in liberation of inexpressible joy.